What is Wrike?
What do you like best about Wrike?
I love the consistency and transparency that we have with our team when using Wrike! We used to use too many spreadsheets and manila folders to track all of our jobs, which frequently got lost and resulted in staff wandering the office to look for the missing folders. Since we implemented Wrike, we now know the status of all jobs with a click of a mouse!
We like being able to create custom workflows (statuses), use custom form requests that translate into auto-generated tasks, roadmap with the calendar tool, and separate work between spaces.
I’ll say this first, Wrike felt intimidated. After messing around with it and seeing how other co-workers use Wrike, I slowly picked it up. It makes a good checklist of things I need to do if you add the chrome plug-in as a companion. I see what gets assigned. I LOVE when you reference another wrike, you can see the status of it in the description of another. Very handy! Conveniently, Wrike contains a few forms of automation that lift some repetition from your workload. Without that, it wouldn’t be as helpful as other task management systems available in the market. I like how the eco-system allows mentioning other users within a comment or Wrike task. It helps involve the correct people to get the jobs completed. Another feature that is VERY useful for me is the tags. Tagging helps me know where this Wrike is related to, which makes everything come together.
Easily adjustable and editable for each project to specifics and details each team needs. Fast and good support from Wrike support personnel. Compared with MS Project or Primavera, Wrike is easier to use and more intuitive. For infrastructure projects, Wrike is an excellent tool to support site teams. Updates, uploads and changes or new works are easily accessible from a cell or office computer for management and ground personnel to have all in one place for easy planning and delivering projects – placing/uploading QA data for handovers of projects.
What do you dislike about Wrike?
Software must be adjusted to work smoothly offline and when returning to wifi and cell connection upload changes. Without Wrike-trained personnel, teams who are 1st-time starters will struggle a lot. Team support from Wrike needs to be there – software usage and setup were easy with the support team, and after remote backing was done, the project succeeded.
As I mentioned before, going into it without help is very discouraging since it’s a complex web API with many moving parts. I think to myself, how do I add custom rules to automate some tasks? Unfortunately, you need to dig for that answer since it’s not straightforward. I would like it if Wrike provided an easier way to implement the chrome plug-in and have a way to make templates via the plug-in. It would make managing my tasks substantially easier if that were possible.
We dislike that there is no dark mode, that you cannot assign tasks to a dummy account or role type for people with no access or who do not exist yet, that you can’t view projects on the kanban board (only tasks), and that skins/themes for the UI are severely lacking (especially with the lack of dark mode).
Some of my team have struggled with the switch over to the Wrike New Experience. At first, I also struggled with the transition, however since I have been using it for a few months, I now see the benefits and why Wrike made the decision to make the changes that they did. I am looking forward to continued improvements, as I have seen them steadily since we implemented Wrike in 2019.
What problems is Wrike solving and how is that benefiting you?
One problem that we always had prior to Wrike was not ever knowing the status of a project without asking every person that was assigned to it. With Wrike, you can easily check the status of all projects without having to take up anyone else’s time. Another problem that we were experiencing was a lack of timely responses due to too many emails in our inbox. They were getting mixed up vendors, clients, and internal emails. With Wrike, we have almost completely eliminated inter email communication and have moved that to strictly Wrike. This allows for a much more organized email inbox to be utilized with clients and vendors only.
We use Wrike to visualize/share/track roadmaps at a high level, as well as manage the day-to-day tasks of projects. Wrike helps us keep organized within individual departments and share work across teams. Having a centralized location for tracking the work that is being done across the company has greatly improved transparency and access to the same information for everyone.
It’s solving a lot of organizational task management issues. It helps keep everyone on point about what you should be doing and when the task is due. Helps that when I go OOO, it notifies project managers that I won’t be available. Another way it’s helping me is by providing a way to track how much time I spend on each task. By using the timer, I can estimate how much I take and figure out a way to optimize my time and know how to allocate that time to essential tasks that require my attention more. Other things that help me solve are keeping everything in one place and showing me what’s related to which Wrike.
No more data loss on remote sites. Handover Quality data and the project. All project data was in one place and easily accessible from any place. Team performance increased – even uneducated workers were using it on the ground and became happier to use and be part of Team delivery.
Wrike Features
Pros
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“So far Wrike has been fantastic. It’s helping us transition to a more natural work flow and keeping everyone on top of projects.”
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“This has been a fantastic addition to our Projects Division toolkits, and has been integral in the success of several projects we have run via Wrike.”
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“I really helping to making our project progress as smooth and as effective as possible.”
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“It’s packed with functionality, good collab tool with our internal teams. Task management is excellent.”
Cons
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“Then they deactivated our account with no warning, and when I asked they said “it’s written on the invoice. I supposedly had access to a CSM, but they never called.”
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“I was introduced to Wrike by a client who swore by it (and still does) but I’m sad to say my experience with Wrike ended there. In my experience, it was needlessly confusing and just not intuitive.”
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“Customer support is poor, be very cautious about changes to level of service or SLA’s mid-contract with no recourse.”
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“Who can say for sure that I didn’t utilize the assistance, in light of the fact that there are access logs, and still keep up with the unapproved charges.”
Wrike Pricing
$0 /month
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Yes, has free trial
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Yes, has free version
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